I still prefer asdf. It does the job just fine. Direnv has its own stdlib, which sometimes I find useful, and make is something I have to install anyway.
I was only vaguely aware of rtx, but after discussing this post at length with people online they've made me aware of the rebranding and the general capabilities of mise.
It sure is great, it is! However, like you, I tend to prefer minimalistic and predictable tools.
That's why I decided to add the small comment in the discussion section of the post, to be fair but also kind of clear that bloating the runtime manager that was supposed to help manage the bloated runtimes and package managers isn't a great idea.
Having said that, if the scope of mise stabilizes and it doesn't turn into a kitchen-sink kind of project, it sure seems sweet!
Mise’s #1 objective is to be a really great tool manager, just like ASDF, but way faster and smarter.
However, it turns out that a tool that needs to be extremely CWD-aware also makes a great .env tool and task runner. I was also a little skeptical, but it’s actually super super useful. Especially because it’s easy to convince team members to install it for the tools, they get the rest for free with easy syntax.
You pretty much nailed it here. Env vars and tasks were kind of a happy accident—I implemented both inside of a day. (different days of course) Just because I realized I had all the building blocks to make them possible already, just needed to arrange them in a different way and they just appeared.
In the future though I see tasks as being the headline for mise over tools. That's a ways out, certainly more than a year, but the thing about tasks is they don't suffer from the drawbacks that both PATH and shims have for putting your tools in the right place. In my personal use of mise I don't actually like using `mise activate` whatsoever. The problem is just that I can't yet do everything with tasks easily enough. Tasks need to get to a point where they're so easy you won't want to bother with having tools in your shell.
Though who knows. I may be off my rocker on that one. I certainly get things wrong as much, if not more, than I get them right.
Mise does a lot of things and I don't buy into the unix philosophy so you may not like it (which is totally fine btw, my goal is not at all for everyone to love it).
That said, I think if you thought about _why_ you like minimalistic and predictable tools you may find that mise solves the underlying reasons for that. My whole thing is about augmenting your environment and not replacing it. This is generally where I contrast mise with tools like nix and docker but I thought it was worth calling out.
I think people like mise because they can use it for just setting some env vars, installing a few npm packages globally, having an easy way to synchronize tool versions between local dev and CI/CD. You can use it for any one of those things and it slots right in wherever you are—whether that's inside VSCode, ssh'ed into a remote machine, in a github action, or inside a docker container in a k8s fleet.
Yeah mise is capable of a lot of different things, but the important thing is that it doesn't force you to change anything _else_ about your setup.
